Thursday, January 15, 2015

Creating With Eastside Art Group

Welcome. I am so happy that you stopped by. My studio is open for you to come in and sit and relax with a cup of tea while I share with you some of the art created from card board boxes by the Eastside Art Group.

Bentley, my Studio Assistant, is waiting in the studio to show you around and the fun we had. Our Eastside Art Group is made up of 8 very talented and diverse artists who once a month get together to teach a class and share their artistic gifts. With so much diversity in the group during the past 2 years we have painted Roses, Sunflowers, Hydrangeas, done metal work and made jewelry, made clay beads, journals, gourd dolls, drums, scarves,fun sewing projects and print making, made adorable Santas and Witches from gourds and learned to use wax and plaster on wood surfaces. as well as wood burning.

My studio very quickly went from this .......

To this . . . . . . .as Marilyn Gallas taught a class on making charming books from re-purposed and reused cardboard using ink, paper, paint, paper packing tape , scissors, etc. Marilyn is a very talented artist who combines her love for photography with mixed media, paper, paints, inks, collages, etc. and has a popular blog www.hrt2hrt4mike.blogspot.com where you can read more about her class. Everyone started creating in their own style. Most of the artists used 10x5 pieces of card board for their art and cut the edges fairly neatly for their books.

I received an 8x8 box at Christmas and fell in love with the hand written words the manufacturer wrote on the shipping box -" Made With Love" and decided to use the box for my project. I cut up the box using a serrated kitchen knife that left the edges ragged. The ragged box and wording lead me to create a whimsical cottage garden book.

I decided to decorate my little book with handwritten garden quotes in keeping with the handwriting on the cover and keep the paintings very whimsical and simple.

The pages were put together with paper packing tape and we left any labels on the boxes showing to add character.

All of the artists are different and it is so much fun to see how the art projects turn out.Libby Williamson is a fabulous teacher, designer and fabric artist and tends to paint more with her hands than a brush. The art she creates is colorful, whimsical and charming !

Libby uses a lot of recycled material in her art and the piece she is holding on the right of the photo is a smashed up egg carton that she painted and was using to incorporate into her art.

Diane Calderwood is an amazing gourd artist and teacher and loves the outdoors, organic art, travel and creating art from recycled materials. Bentley adores her and was so happy when she let him sit in her lap and help her in creating a photo album of a trip that she and her family took. She made little pockets to hold family photos.

Norma Prickett is an amazing teacher, gourd and doll artist and generally creates something in our classes for her adorable Granddaughter. Today she created a little book for herself and used various papers embellished with paint, stamps and inks as well as actually carved out designs in the cardboard to add texture.

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Marilyn, our teacher for the day, created a book using mainly black and white. She also did a lot of carving out on the cardboard to add dimension.

Linda Bucci is the visionary who put our Eastside Art Group together. She is a published jewelry designer, mixed media artist, teacher and metal smith. She created a dramatic cardboard book using lots of black and sparkle and cutouts made from the cardboard. She has a new blog where she shares tips on art, art shows and happenings and her beautiful jewelry and you can visit her at www.lindabucci.blogspot.com

Jacki Long is a teacher, collage and mixed media artist, and graphic designer,. She had to leave early before she finished her collage art shown below.

I borrowed the collage below she made of some of the works in progress to share with you. You can see more of Jacki's wonderful completed collage art on her blog at www.jackilong.blogspot.com where she posts every day - yes a blog post every day!!!

Thank you for stopping by. I sincerely appreciate your visits, e-mails, comments and those who follow my blog. I will be on a little blog break while my floors are being refinished and will be back on

January 25th to participate in Vicki Boster's Grow Your Blog Meet and Greet Blog Party over at

13 comments:

Great post, Erin. Your camera took much better pictures than my phone. Thank you once again for sharing your darling studio with us. The energy in that studio is bright and bursting with inspiration. ❤❤

I enjoyed looking at all the creations. I'm sure you had a great time, Erin. Bentley certainly seems happy. I get together once a month with quilters and crafters at our church and it's always a wonderful time of fellowship and creativity. I'll check out the blogs you mentioned. Have a great weekend! xxx ~ Nancy

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On any given day I think about how grateful I am to God for gifting me with a creative spirit and how lucky I am to be able to share my gift with my wonderful Blog Friends. Thank you for your visits, comments and those who follow my blog.

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